Daylight saving time ended
this morning. I had planned ahead and reset my watch and alarm clock, leaving the cameras,
cars and kitchen equipment to be done today.

And then I started cooking breakfast—before putting the clocks back! So we had breakfast an
hour too early. The idea of resetting the clocks in the morning is good, but I really
should do it first thing.

And then there were the cameras to sync. How do you do it accurately? The E-PM1 and
E-PM2 require
manual setting, including seconds, but when does the time take effect? I'm guessing when
you press OK, but that's not 100% clear, and there's no way to get the camera to
display seconds when running.

The E-M1s Mark I
and II are simpler, at least in theory: you can synchronize with a mobile phone (“WLan”) and
set to its time. It only took me 10 minutes, hindered mainly by this appalling OI.Share app, and also by the fact that I had
done an unnecessary firmware update on the E-M1 Mark I and lost the credentials. But for
some reason it acted as if it didn't recognize the Mark II either, though it was too polite
to say so. And the photo (“scan”) of the QR
code took four attempts because it couldn't get the exposure right.

I've been trying various approaches to huevos a la Flamenca on a
couple of occasions, but somehow it never quite worked out. In particular, it seems
that the eggs should be grilled. I tried that again today, and was rewarded by watching an
egg yolk burst just as I took it out of the grill, here at the top:

The eggs also taste leathery when grilled this way, and the process is tedious. So I've
started my own recipe, titled hueovos a
la tigre (an inside joke), where the eggs are fried instead of grilled. I'm sure
there's more work to be done on it. Here the current ingredients:

More playing around with yesterday's house
photos today. I now have managed to
handle TIFF images and use Photomatix PRO, though there are still a number
of loose ends. I've improved my cropstack script to only trim images where it's necessary—which seems to be
just about every time with Photomatix—so I can leave the call as part of the script.

What I haven't managed is to work out how to group the images correctly. I made a big
mistake a while back by introducing two image groups with the names house-from-ssw and
house-from-ssw-2. The individual components (4 in the first case) have names
like house-from-ssw-2-1EV and house-from-ssw-2+1EV, which lands the
alphabetical sort sequence right in the middle of the second images. It would be
straightforward to rename the second series of images to something else, but I already have
hundreds of images with the old name, and potentially they're known on the web.

That might seem unlikely, but when I experimented with
using PNG instead
of JPEG for some of my old photos from 1970,
and then changed my mind, I got hundreds of error messages where some web search engine was
trying to access the old images. In the end I put
in symlinks to shut them up.

Apart from that, Photomatix is showing more of its irritating Microsoft background,
including reverting to its own idea of where I should be putting my images, and requiring me
to climb trees to get to where I had been. Why can't these things have a concept of
a working directory?

When did we last make that? It must have been some time ago. The only mention in my diary
seems to be from 1 December 1963, and clearly I didn't cook it myself.
The recipe dates from 26 March 2008, and the last relevant update dates from 21 October 2011. The format required updating as a result.

One of the components for shepherd's pie is mashed potato, something that we don't use for
any other purpose. I found no less than three bags of “instant” mash in the pantry, with
use-by dates of “23-06-09”, “19/10/10” and “04-02-12”, the first of them opened. Rejected
the first because it had been opened, and the second because it requires a secret
ingredient: “Flora Salt Reduced spread” (2 teaspoons). Decided on the last, from ALDI, which has one of the clearest instructions: ½ cup (55 g) of the powder (conveniently 24.4% of
the 225 g package) with 1 cup (250 mL) of water. OK, we can't get away from the
cups, but at least they give real quantities.

Problem: they're wrong. There's far too little water. I had to add probably another 60 ml
of water to make a usable result. But that wasn't the only issue: I had written 150 g of
mashed potato to 300 g of meat. And in the end I found that I needed 600 g. How could I
have got that so wrong?

The other issue was the amount of gravy for the meat. In the course of time I had increased
it from 300 ml to 350 ml, and that was marginally too much. Until proof of the contrary, I
think I need to keep it the same as the weight of the meat.

Lorraine Carranza along again for brunch this morning, this time with modified bacon and
eggs: in addition to typical Anglo-Saxon fare, we had frijoles refritos and chorizo, which Lorraine found good,
though I noted that she got through my baked
beans first.

I'm still having infection issues with my sourdough starters, and it occurred to me that
they might make good subjects for macro photos, in particular with the new bellows that I
got last June, and which I
have never really used. So I set off and got a number of more conventional photos. The
dish in the first photo is 11.5 cm in diameter (why exactly that diameter?), so it doesn't
count as a macro. The next ones were done at 1:1 with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 60 mm
f/2.8 Macro, and then again with 26 mm extension tubes:

But this stupid built-in lens hood got in the way, and I had to give that up. OK,
how about the Raynox 35 mm
f/2.8 that came with the bellows? That would have the added advantage of almost 50%
more magnification.

So I mounted it, and tried to focus. In the end I gave up and tried to focus on a piece of
printed paper:

The distance from the front of the lens to the object can't have been more than a few
millimetres. I can't take photos like that. I wonder what the previous owner did. I need
a reversing ring. I have one, somewhere, but I haven't seen for 3 years, since we moved to
Stones Road. It must be in some unexpected place in a moving carton. Do I go searching for
it or buy a new one? For some reason new ones are surprisingly expensive, up to $40.

In passing, it's interesting to see how well the viewfinder display works with a mirrorless
camera (first image above). This setup would have corresponded to an magnification of about
5:1, as the lettering shows, but the viewfinder illumination is completely normal.

Off to Ballarat for our weekly shopping
expedition. For once, Yvonne didn't have any doctor's
appointments, but she made up for it by having her hair done. I took the opportunity to go
to Dan Murphy's for supplies.

Timing wasn't what I expected. It must take between 10 and 15 minutes to get to Dan
Murphy's, and Yvonne's hair dressing took 30 minutes. She called me just as I was loading
my purchases into the car, and I suggested that she walk to Woolworths in Sebastopol, and that I
would pick her up.

A quarter of an hour later I was there and found her having gone about two-thirds of the
distance—not what I had expected. One forgets how far distances are when you go by car. In
fact, it's 1.3 km, and Google Maps
estimated 16 minutes. But then, it claims that I only needed 10 minutes for my journey.

The DEREEL OUTPOST Facebook group came to life again today: NBN
outages again. And somebody pointed to something I had said that
today was the third day of outages. But all I saw was some pretty flaky connectivity round
10:10.

When we got home from town, though, it was another matter: we had had an outage of between
20 and 30 minutes (my current reporting is not very accurate). Was this an NBN-related outage? If so, hopefully we're finally done
with them.

Since moving away from Gmailtwo weeks ago I have had lots
of spam, not surprisingly. Is it worth it? My issues with Gmail were related to SPF, and that is only set
for some sites, like FreeBSD. For FreeBSD I
set my email address to send directly to Gmail, so that problem no longer exists. What
about the rest? Can I do it with them too? It's worth a try.

Never mind that saner people have noticed that the sum he mentioned (ostensibly the trade
deficit between China and the USA) is incorrect. Wikipedia gives a sum of $ 347,038 million. Maybe he has knowledge that he hasn't
shared before.

And then the “passport photo” at the top of my other pages, including my diary, is also of
the same age, though I haven't preserved any of
the Exif data, nor even the original. I
think it was taken by Anthony Rumble on
a Nikon DSLR round 4 September 2003:

Yvonne is gradually becoming more mobile, and though she's
still not allowed to ride, she's doing plenty of groundwork. Today she asked me to take
some photos, so I did, 668 shots in 10 minutes, an average of a little over one a second.
And some were worth keeping. Yvonne likes this one because the horse (Carlotta) is sticking her tongue out:

One of the online sources that I'm subscribed to is SBS On Demand, from the Australian broadcaster
SBS. Before I stopped using broadcast TV, SBS was
my channel of choice, and they have a reasonable number of foreign-language programmes. But
SBS On Demand is so painful to use that I don't bother.

Today, though, I took another look. Paris Etc (their capitalization) looked like a possibility. Please log in. OK. And
I ended up with an empty screen that stayed empty for longer than made sense.

But I have the URL. Can youtube-dl make any
sense of it? It seems unlikely, but yes, it could! It wasn't even interested in access
credentials.

And the result? A 720p file with the lowest
quality I have yet seen. In comparison with a German programme it's only 38% of the data
rate:

Can that be deliberate? Not beyond the bounds of possibility, but it stabilized after a
while when the image stopped moving, suggesting bandwidth issues. And the rest of the film
seemed less sharp, especially in moving scenes.

But that wasn't all. This series is Just Plain Strange, and it reminds me of what I
discovered 21 years ago when we moved back to Australia: SBS' choice of material seems to be
decidedly uncomfortable.

House photo day again today, and I'm
still having my fun with my processing software. Things like generating the
“contact prints” still don't work
correctly, and I'm having difficulty debugging the (very crufty) script that almost does the
work.

Somehow I really don't like the Bourne
shell programming language. 12 years ago I
learnt PHP for a web project, and that proves
to be easier for many things, even if many of my
right-wing BSD friends laugh at me because of
it. But it's not really designed for this kind of work, and some of the language details
show it. Perl? That's an old, worn-out
magic word, it seems. I don't know anybody who uses it any more, and my previous experience
with it suggests that it's Bourne shell on steroids.
Python? Not
really designed for this kind of work either.

Is there really nothing better out there? The name doesn't even need to start
with P.

I still read the daily email from How-to Geek, though much of it seems poorly prepared. Today I was told why smart fridges
are the future. It seems that the clever thing about them is that they contain a
camera, enabling you to see what's in there without opening the door, and also while you're
shopping.

Somehow I can't relate to that. I often enough have difficulty finding things in the fridge
with the door open. How many cameras do I need to be able to show all the shelves? Two per
shelf (the second to show what's in the door)? Is that what they have? And when I want to
buy groceries, it's based on recipe planning. The fridge can't help you there, but the, I
suppose that's no longer modern.

But the article goes on. Some of the headings are:

They Have Touch Screens, Which You Probably Use in the Kitchen Anyway

Well, no. I'm grudgingly having to accept the presence of touch screens, but for me
they're the second worst form of data entry. Not only do I not use them in the kitchen,
I avoid using them anywhere. But how do you use a touch screen with greasy fingers?

They Have Alexa Built-In, Which Is Handy in the Kitchen

And this is the worst: voice input. I have to admit, though, that it might come in
handy in the kitchen when you have both hands dirty, though I can't think what use it
could be yet. Neither can the article, as I investigate below.

This Is Where Appliances Are Heading, So Get Used to It

I suppose I'm going to have to accept that things are going in this direction, but it
doesn't mean that I like it, and hopefully the market will mature, change direction and
come up with something useful.

So what are the advantages of voice input? Conveniently, there's another article on that topic:

Convert measurements. What for? My
recipes are already specified in the correct measurements. Based on other
documentation, my guess is that it would fail miserably at this task. The image of
measuring spoons adds to my prejudice, as does the text of this section:

When cooking or baking, it’s always nice to know what the conversions are for various
measurements, like how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon or how many cups are in a
gallon. Those are basic conversions that are common knowledge for a lot of people, but
if you don’t spend a lot of time in the kitchen, you can ask Alexa for help.

For example, you can say “Alexa, how many tablespoons are in a cup?” or “Alexa, how
many pints are in a gallon?”. Alexa can convert pretty much anything into anything,
and give you the units you need without having to Google it on your phone.

Assuming that you still use antiquated units like spoons and gallons, what is the chance
that Alexa will choose the correct ones? In Australia a tablespoon is ⅓ larger than in
the USA, and a gallon is either 25% more or some random quantity invented by Sydney
brewers to cheat their customers. What will “she” choose? And how would “she” know
where the recipe came from. Imagine:

“Alexa, I have this recipe from the Kuching Salvation Army cookbook. How much are 4
katis? And how much is 10 cts of turmeric?”

Set a timer? How would that work in practice? The article states:

“Simply say “Alexa, set a timer for 20 minutes” and it will begin counting down. When
the timer reaches zero, it’ll blare out a noticeable, yet calm alarm sound that won’t
make you jump like a loud beeping noise would.”

OK, so the issue is the sound that the alarm makes? And what if you have more than one
timer going? That should be possible, but I get the impression that nobody has thought
of that yet, so I wouldn't put money on the possibility. This isn't theoretical: I have
four timers in the kitchen, each with its own sound.

And these aren't made up: they're on my current shopping list. In fact, I've found that
it's really easier to write on paper for these things. I do it myself rather than
asking Yvonne to write it down for me, because it's
easier than explaining. How much more difficult is it to explain to Alexa?

Play Music

Wow. Forget the idea of a sound system. Have a special one just for the kitchen that
requires explanation.

Learn How to Make Mixed Drinks

“The Bartender is a cool third-party Alexa Skill that you can install and it includes
over 12,000 drink recipes to choose from. Simply say something like “Alexa, ask The
Bartender how do I make a Tom Collins.” Alexa will then tell you what ingredients you
need and how to make the drink.”

And then? How do I go back and look at the ingredients one at a time? That's why
recipes are written.

Learn How to Make Certain Dishes

“Another useful third-party Alexa Skill is called Recipe Buddy, and it was one of the
only third-party skills that I could find that was able to do what it does. Basically,
you can say something like “Alexa, ask Recipe Buddy how do I make chicken picatta.””

That's the same issue as with the drinks. How would I handle a recipe like chicken biriani? You need to refer
forwards and backwards.

So what useful functionality are we left with? Arguably a way to write things on a grocery
list, assuming (a big assumption) that Alexa can handle it. No thanks. I suppose I might
find a way to do that via my mobile phone one day when I'm bored, but I'd have to be very
bored.

Well, I know why I don't want
one, but I was guessing that my reasons have nothing to do with the reasons in the
article. But in fact, there is a resemblance. They mention how difficult they are to use
and suggest a set-top box instead. They don't mention the alternative of connecting a
computer to a dumb TV, like I do. Dammit, even Microsoft would run rings round Android TV . The thing that they mention
that I didn't complain about was the privacy aspect of the TV listening to what I'm doing,
and apparently the software embeds commercials in whatever it's doing. Not in my lounge
room.

The new beds that Warrick Pitcher laid out in January still haven't been planted:
summer's the wrong time, and we couldn't make up our mind what to plant. But time is moving
on, and it's time for spring bulbs. Last year we bought some cheap bulbs at
the BallaratMarket, so off there today to get some more.

Out of luck. They weren't there, and in fact the market was pretty empty. That didn't stop
us buying some things, including a bright red
flowering Carpobrotus and three tubes
of blue Chaenostoma
cordatum, sold as Sutera cordata:

But it is slowly? This article suggests that there might be a sudden change in the very near future.
Certainly it seems that Canon is thinking seriously in that direction. And for some reason
everybody is talking about “full frame” cameras. I don't see any point in that form factor
any more, but since when has marketing paid attention to my opinions—or the facts?

OK, we need fill-in flash from behind. The STF-8 only works on the camera, so I needed some
kind of repeater. That's more difficult than it sounds: the pre-flash of the TTL
measurements would trigger any dumb slave receiver, so I needed to use something that
understands the Olympus flash protocol. And for me that means the mecablitz 58 AF-2. I put it beside the plant, pointing at the backdrop:

Next, work out how to use the remote flash stuff. That's simple on the STF-8: leave it as
it is. Set the slave flash to slave, channel 1, group A. And that's all I could set. The
rest was on the camera. As usual, just finding the method in the “instructions” was a problem. Summary: Camera menu 2, set RC mode on. Then, it tells
me, “The LV super control panel switches to RC mode”. What does that mean? I've searched
the entire manual and found no definition for “LV”, though it appears that it stands for
“Live View”, a carry-over from the DSLR
days. Elsewhere it states:

Press the blob button to switch between live view and viewfinder shooting (live
view and super control panel display). If the super control panel (P. 50) is displayed in
the monitor, the viewfinder will turn on when you put your eye to the viewfinder.

“Live view” and “viewfinder” “shooting” are now the same thing. It looks as if this one
hasn't been updated since the DSLR days either. But it does indirectly confirm my
impression that “LV” stands for “live view”.

And in the LV Super Control Panel I was able to set the behaviour. I thought. The next
image came out:

OK, I wanted the background burnt out. But this seems to have burnt out the foreground too.
Admittedly, the flash was on manual, so it could really have overexposed the foreground via
bounce flash. Set it to TTL as well:

That's arguably correctly exposed for the background, but the foreground is completely
underexposed.

What's going on here? After quite some time I have decided that the system has optimized
the total flash intensity without regard for the areas that I wanted illuminated. Since the
mecablitz is about 50 times as strong as the STF-8, it wins, and my subject is underexposed.
I suppose there's a way to adjust things, but like every time I use one of Olympus' flash
modes, I find that I could have done it better manually.

But then we had an outage today! And an outage! And an outage! In total, there were six
of them. From my NBN stats page:

Start time

End time

Duration

Badness

from

to

(seconds)

1523241136

1523241239

103

0.009

#

9 April 2018 12:32:16

9 April 2018 12:33:59

1523241664

1523242689

1025

8.471

#

9 April 2018 12:41:04

9 April 2018 12:58:09

1523248702

1523248836

134

0.599

#

9 April 2018 14:38:22

9 April 2018 14:40:36

1523250998

1523252201

1203

1.665

#

9 April 2018 15:16:38

9 April 2018 15:36:41

1523252625

1523253946

1321

8.491

#

9 April 2018 15:43:45

9 April 2018 16:05:46

1523254277

1523254426

149

10.876

#

9 April 2018 16:11:17

9 April 2018 16:13:46

Date

Outages

Duration

Availability

Date

(seconds)

1523196000

6

3935

95.45%

#

9 April 2018

Yes, they were scheduled outages, just two days late, during their ambiguously formulated
“back up” time, which doesn't mean when the link is back up, but an alternative if things go
wrong the first time.

This time the total outage time was round 72 minutes, considerably better than the 7½ hours
that I had on 15 March and another 7½ hours that I had on 27 March. But the continual
bouncing made me wonder whether it was worth it.

One of the TV series that Yvonne wants to see is „Der Landarzt“ (“The country doctor”), a
series that we watched in Germany. Last week I got a message telling me that series 18 was
coming on ZDF, starting on last Saturday.

But MediathekView didn't list it.
Dammit, another false negative. Off to ZDF to look for it. Not there, either:

Yes, that's just the beginning. Look at that stylized right arrow in the middle of the last
entry. Like so many other misguided web sites, ZDF thinks that everybody should share in
the pain of “swiping” that the designers of mobile phone software have inflicted upon us.
But after “swiping” to the end, it still wasn't there.

20 results, sorted by “Relevanz”. And nothing even remotely
relevant. Papa Doc? What kind of
country doctor was he? And again, no match for the search criterion.

OK, what about the programme? That's hidden behind the “Live TV” link, and sure enough, I
can find the (not exactly live) programme details for nearly a month in advance, and many
months ago. Maybe they postponed the series by a week? And sure enough, they claim to be
broadcasting it this coming Saturday—but the third and fourth episodes! OK, back to look at
the programme for last Saturday:

One of the things that we bought on Sunday was a flower basket stand, for which we bought the baskets I mentioned
yesterday. Put it together and planted
the Chaenostoma cordatum in
three of the baskets:

A week or two ago there was a question on Quora: “Why does FreeBSD have
virtually no (0%) desktop market share?”.

Good question, one worthy of clarification. What's a desktop? What's a market? I wrote an
answer making assumptions in both case, and (somewhat to my surprise) it was
relatively well received.

Later, Terry Lambert also wrote a response. I can't call it an answer, because it went off on a tangent about the
uselessness of X. Terry's not stupid, and some of
the things that he wrote made sense. Only they didn't have anything to do with
FreeBSD. The only mention of FreeBSD was to
note that Linux and FreeBSD both have the same issues with X.

Still, worthy of reading, and I spent a lot of today thinking of how to address it, probably
more effort than necessary. But it's worth summarizing: He blames a lot of X's perceived
problems on early design decisions to run on “cheap hardware”, and to separate core display
functionality from services like window management and widgets.

What's wrong with that? Look at Microsoft, which barely has window management, and you'd
have to applaud the designers for their foresight. But, although he doesn't say so, I don't
think Terry is looking at Microsoft: he's looking at Apple. And possibly it has more
consistent window management. Only it's so primitive that it's one of the reasons I don't
use Apple.

And the widgets? He didn't elaborate, and I didn't understand. I suspect that it would make
more sense if you had a good knowledge of both X and Apple widget approaches. Maybe he's
making an implicit “there can only be one” claim.

But it's worth thinking about the efficiency viewpoint. A different architecture could
greatly improve performance. But X has survived and thrived for decades with its archaic
design decisions, and I don't have any significant performance issues. Isn't that an
indication of success?

Yvonne was born
in Weimar a few months before the
foundation of the DDR. At the time,
the area was occupied by Soviet
troops.

What was her nationality at birth? Clearly she wasn't a citizen of the DDR—that happened
automatically later. Was she stateless? That seems unlikely. Was she a citizen of the
German Reich? That
collapsed years before she was born.

The answers were interesting, in particular this one: Thuringian. It seems
that there was no German nationality
until Hitler'sGleichschaltungsgesetz.
Until then, nationality was a matter of the
„Land“, not the Reich. If you accept the
validity of the Gleichschaltungsgesetz after the collapse of Hitler's regime, then she was
also German. Otherwise she was just Thuringian.

Or did they? What they struck was an Iranian base
in Palmyra. Nothing to do with the
chemical attack, everything to do
with Israel's preoccupation
with Iran. To quote:

It followed a vow by President Trump to respond to an apparent chemical weapons attack by
the Syrian government near Damascus. It did not appear to have been in response to that
event, raising the possibility that Israel had merely seized the opportunity to take out
what it saw as a threat to its own security.

That's a good way to spread the conflict even further afield.

Bravo, Trump, for encouraging a regime that even before was far more aggressive than would
have been possible without US protection!

Into Ballarat this morning to take
Yvonne to the Base
Hospital for a final X-ray and
examination. I went shopping during that time, but she was finished far more quickly than I
had expected. Verdict: she's recovered, after only three months. She can drive a car
again. More importantly, she can ride again:

So when passing through Cambrian
Hill this morning, I thought of taking a photo. Problem: it was hazy. Solution:
DxO PhotoLab has functionality to see through the haze. To be on the safe side, I took HDR images (my normal
-3EV/0EV/+3EV triplet), this time with no offset, and processed them both with and without
haze removal. After passing them through Photomatix PRO, I had (first without haze removal, then with):

Yes, I could enhance things, but clearly neither of those are candidates for replacing the
current image. And I don't see that the haze reduction has improved things at all. What I
now see are blobs in the sky that weren't there in the original, along with noise in the sky
that stops close to the bottom. Time to wait for better weather.

On the way home today, picked up my latest toy, a
cheap monopod. There's not much to it,
just a stick. The image on the seller's page gives a couple of details:

The obvious one is that it's too short. I considered that when I bought it, and I thought
it might be OK for Yvonne. Maybe it is—she thinks so—but
it's too short for me (1.55 m). I planned to use it for the videos above, but it proved not to help at
all.

Apart from that, it's fine. Time to look for a longer monopod. It's interesting to note
that the monopod that in the image is not the one I have: it has a long top joint, and the
others are also folded together. Something in between would be just right.

This notification is to let you know that we will be performing network maintenance work. Due to this activity the services listed below will experience a loss of connectivity for up to 1 hrs 0 mins during the change window.

Dammit, we've had 59,454 seconds (16½ hours) of outages already in the past four weeks, all
of it during the day. When will it ever stop?

Time to give the NBN a call. Where's the phone number? They've hidden it! All I could
find was a “contact form”, which required me to give name, address, email address and
telephone number. But it didn't accept my phone number (fully qualified according to
the E.164 standard, to be on the safe
side):

How do you complete that? My best guess was “If You Want to Use A Phone as Your Main PC,
You Should Get Your Head Read”, but no, it recommended Android. Based on my
experience, that's a real condemnation
of Apple. But reading the article was marginally interesting: it seems that you can connect various
peripherals (“Sometimes a touchscreen just isn’t enough”, “you could also cast your device’s
screen to a Chromecast-connected TV for a wireless experience”). Yes, as the Germans say,
you could put rivets in your ears, hang pancakes off them and pretend to be
a Dachshund. But I suppose it's
something to keep in mind if I ever find myself in that emergency.

I'm still thinking of updating my title photos, and spent some time today playing around
with what essentially are selfies, though with much more equipment. It's amazing how much
effect just a small difference in lighting and angles have. I made the mistake of mounting
the forward-pointing monitor above the camera, not a good place to look at: the mounting of
the camera (15 cm below the lens) looks better.

And in the end, my appearance hasn't changed that much in the last 15 years:

As promised, discovered that we had had a further 5 National Broadband Network outages overnight, still only a total of a little less
than 15 minutes in total. But that's now 15 planned outages in just over 4 weeks, now a
total of 60,304 seconds (16¾ hours). And they're promising even more.

Called up Aussie Broadband today,
mainly for a billing inquiry, but also took the opportunity to talk to support about the NBN
fiasco. Spoke to Rob, who did, indeed, have a few interesting comments. It seems that
they're upgrading the towers to dual frequencies. So far they operate in the 2,300 MHz
range, but they're adding support for 3,500 MHz. It wasn't immediately clear what the
purpose was, though possibly bandwidth would be one option. Rob thinks it's not to be able
to add further customers, and there's a possibility I'll hear from Skybridge to replace the ODU (antenna) and IDU
(NTD). Another potential
outage that might actually have some benefit.

And why so many outages? I already knew that the uplink (a term that he didn't seem to
understand in this context) doesn't necessarily go to a POI: it can be daisy-chained off
other towers, so any work on that tower will also take ours offline. Rob was disparaging
about the way the have no backup link; it would cost very little to have an alternative
route to the POI, but they don't do that.

He mentioned other maintenance work that might be needed, in particular cabling on the
tower. Aussie still run a WiMax service,
and it seems that one of the biggest problems they have
is cockatoos chewing through the
cabling. You'd hope, though, that the NBN had learnt from others' prior experience and
placed all cables in metal conduit.

And the possibility of a complaint? As I suspected, the Telecom Industry Ombudsman is no use. They will just take
action (if at all) against the ISP, not NBN. His suggestion matched my thoughts: local
Federal MP. Now when are
the next elections?

Other points of interest: he stated that they seem to have a better than average
relationship with the NBN, and that they get informed about upcoming outages as a result.
That might be one reason why other ISPs don't inform their customers: they don't know in
advance. I'm not too sure how accurate that information is, though.

He also pointed me at Oztowers, which
gives information about mobile telephone and NBN towers. The search function is flaky: it
accepts (and ignores) “suburb” names like
“Dereel”, and to get results you need to
input the post code and then select the town from a drop-down list. It's also not overly
accurate: it lumps Dereel's NBN tower and the Telstra tower together, and it shows the Telstra service as “Proposed Service”,
although it's been up and running for over 4 months. It also shows interesting information about frequencies, that the
NBN 3,500 MHz service is “proposed”, while
in Sebastopol,
Buninyong
and Enfield it's apparently
active.

Up this morning to be told by Yvonne that “the server is
offline”, apparently something that her software had told her. Sure enough, eureka
was down after a prolonged power
failure.

And why not the others? Some time ago I put eureka on its own UPS because of issues I
had had with the house wiring. Originally it was in series with the house UPS, but issues
with power distribution caused it to complain all the time, so I connected it to a non-UPS
power point. And clearly the dedicated UPS didn't maintain the power as long as the house
UPS.

How long? Hard to day, of course. lagoon reported communication at 2:43, but the
next scheduled log message at 2:49 didn't happen. So I could guess at 2:46. How long had
the power been out? Under daytime conditions the UPS reports a capacity of 20 minutes, but
without the monitors it's more like 40, meaning a guessed outage start of 2:06. The power
came back at 3:58, so it seems that the house UPS (running effectively lagoon
and teevee, as well as a couple of alarm clocks) happily weathered an outage of 2
hours or so. Clearly I'll need to put the UPS in series again, until we can finally get
battery-backed solar electricity.

What caused that? The obvious thing is that the message came from a FreeBSD component, so it's not as if the disk was
completely trashed. It came after loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf, which also
loads /boot/loader.conf if it's there. Incorrect configuration? Dammit, why do
these things have to happen just after getting up? But things looked correct, only the
loader variables rootdev and currdev pointed to different disks. OK, try
resetting currdev:

The alternative boot partition is dated 14 June 2017, but looking
back at my diary there's no evidence that I ever tried to boot it. I was playing around
with updates via virtual machines (eureso) at the time, and it looks as
if I copied the files but never ran them.

Five years ago there was a
coordinated mass garage sale
in Enfield, 14 of them. Not to
be outdone, Julie Dongahy has organized the mother of all garage sales, about 30 of them,
stretching from Napoleons
to Rokewood, a distance of
over 30 km.

The Enfield event was quite a success, so put most of the addresses into my GPS navigator,
and in late morning off to take a look. About half of them weren't there! Here an example:

In the end we only went to Dereel and
Enfield, though Yvonne had looked in in Rokewood Junction earlier. We bought things at only
two places. Yvonne had cautiously withdrawn $200 from the
bank, but we spent $11 total, including $2 for a portable CD player/cassette player/radio,
whose CD part proved to be completely non-functional.

Do I take it back? I'd get the money back, but it's almost not worth the petrol. 10 km
there and back would use about 1.1 l petrol, currently round $1.60.

It seems forever since I signed up with LinkedIn, and I continually get link requests from people I've never heard of, this despite my
request on my profile page to establish contact before just blindly asking for a link.
That's not surprising, though: it seems that they have modified their web site and either
removed the “about me” section or made it so difficult to find that I can't find it even
when I know it was there.

My policy with such requests is: if they're linked to somebody I know personally, I usually
accept it. Otherwise I ignore it (I can no longer say that I don't know the person).

Brian Poxon
Housemaster, Tower House at Dean Close School, Cheltenham
Gloucester, United Kingdom

That doesn't look like normal spam. Could he be somebody that I knew at school? Looking at the web site, it looks very much in the style of
my school, but is there a Brian Poxon there? I couldn't even find what houses there were.

Went to take a look and discovered that it was sent to an email address not linked with my
LinkedIn membership. But the headers look correct: the message did come from LinkedIn. Why
did they send it to an address that I never mentioned to them? And how did they associate
it with my account?

By contrast, the other less obvious spam to a specified address was clear:

The weather this weekend has been particularly bad. Yesterday it was far too windy for my
house photos, and it really was today
as well. But there's no sign of it letting up, so I took them anyway.

Surprise, surprise! Photomatix PRO managed to merge the HDR sequences really well. Here an example where La Tigre was moving as I took the
sequence (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour):

The poor image quality is because two of the images were exposed 3 EV from the correct
exposure, and I corrected it to make the comparison more uniform. And somehow Photomatix
managed to make this out of it:

Isn't that simple? Copy them to your computer? That's what I do, even with a phone. Why
should I need a different method because it's a phone? Ah, but I don't understand: this
is modern: use Google Drive, Amazon Prime Photos, Dropbox or iCloud (if you want to
lock yourself into Apple for the rest of your life). Some of these even cost money,
and they ensure that you can't get at them if you're off the net for whatever reason. When
you're on the net, it still takes time to transfer an image. Sigh.

So we managed to spend $11 on our garage sale yesterday. Clearly that wasn't enough
for Yvonne, so today she decided to go to Julie Donaghy's
sale, which was still ongoing. And sure enough, she managed to spend another $11.

While we were there, discussed
the pomegranates that we had picked
up last
month. We had left them a couple of weeks to let them ripen, but clearly it wasn't
enough, and they were still unripe inside.

Got up this morning and discovered that we had no hot water. Dammit, it's only been
three weeks since I
reset the circuit breaker on the hot water system. Out to do it again, but it hadn't
tripped. The power switch? It certainly didn't look “on”, but it had worked in the past.
Played with it a bit, confirming that it still wouldn't remain in the “on” position, then to
the meter box to turn on power boost. And the difference in the meter blink showed
immediately that it was now heating, as did the voltage on the top side of the circuit
breaker. So: time to replace the switch?

As if that wasn't enough, the plumbing work done in January is
annoying me: for some reason, the drainpipe in the bathroom is leaking, and I can't just
tighten it up. It appears to not be inserted correctly—there's a distinct kink in the joint
just below the shelf in the middle:

But that's above the S bend. The only one that could leak should be the other one in the
middle, and that's where I think the problem is. One way or another, what can that have to
do with the plumbing work, and why should it just start now?

And then the tap in the kitchen isn't working properly. It has a switch button that
switches between a jet and a spray. The spray has always been a bit lop-sided:

The monopod that I received last week seems reasonable enough,
except that it's too short for me at only 1.55 m. So I gave it to Yvonne, who thinks that she can get by with it because she doesn't use a viewfinder.
For myself I ordered a new one, $1 more expensive and 26 cm longer. And it's here already!
A little more sturdy, high enough (in fact, 1 or 2 cm too high, which I can easily adjust).
About the only downside are the slightly stiff and too-small clips to hold the sections in
place.

Chris Bahlo has bought a converter to digitize
her VHS cassettes. It doesn't work well, and
she has asked me to do it for her (with my primaeval copy-to-DVD-recorder). But I asked her
for the device so I could take a look at it:

The middle of the month is gone, but the weather was so bad that I didn't have time to take
my monthly garden flower photos.

The beginning of the month was mild, and things flowered relatively well. But then we had a
few days of strong winds and heavy rain, and that made a big difference—also in the fact
that I didn't take the photos until 17 April.

There's not very much to say. The roses have recovered well after getting more water:

To summarize: “You asked us to transfer money. We did it. It's gone, and we can't say
where it is. Bad luck”.

Bad luck? I gave them instructions to perform a transfer. They removed the money from my
account, but it didn't arrive at the destination: they lost the money. And not only will
they not tell me why (“privacy concerns”—what kind of privacy?), they want to know nothing
more about it. About the only information of any use was that it was an “unintended
recipient”. If this unintended recipient refuses to return the money, it's a criminal act.
What privacy?

After I cooled down a bit, at 14:17 I called their complaints number (1800-805-154) and
spoke to Dami[ae]n, who told me that I couldn't get my money back because it was an
“Internet” transfer. With a little
further prodding, he was able to give me details that the bank didn't see fit to include in
their letter: the money had gone to a Gordon. He didn't give the surname, but that sounds
like the intended recipient. So why did they write unintended recipient? Oh, that's
what they do. What privacy concerns? He couldn't say. But Gordon had been informed and
had refused to return the money. He even suggested that Gordon might have been acting
dishonestly. Modulo un, that was my assumption. But since when do banks use privacy
to cover up illegal activities?

He offered to send an official letter to my ANZ email address, but I refused. Based on
their previous activity, I don't trust them any more. Asked for a resolution of the voice
non-recognition system too, and he told me that there was none: there's no way around it,
because it's the easiest. So I gave him some of the responses (“A response was not
received”, “Please select one of the options”, “Please answer Yes or No”), and of course he
was just as confused as I was. But if they claim to me that it's the easiest when I tell
them that I have significant problems with it, they can't be listening.

So did they really contact Gordon? Dami.n gave me the account details to which the money
had been transferred. Called Gordon up. Yes, that's his account. No, nobody had contacted
him. He checked, and the money was there.

Case closed? On one level, yes. But ANZ had managed to make a mountain out of a molehill,
and sent me a form letter which was Just Plain Wrong. And Dami.n doesn't seem to find
anything wrong in that.

Thinking about this matter, it seems that there's an excellent opportunity for dishonest
programmers to make money here: write the software that performs the transfer, identify
exceptions (transfer to a non-existent account number, for example) and transfer to a
different short-lived account of which they are the beneficiary. Since the bank is not
interested in following up on lost transfers, there's little chance that they will be
caught.

I am left, more than ever, with the impression that ANZ just Doesn't Care. How can any
professional entity write “unintended” when they mean ”intended”? And how can their
complaints line defend this incompetence? Time to change to a new bank? Yes, in principle.
But where do I find one that's better?

Finally got round to planting the bulbs that we bought 10 days ago. Most of them went into
the new bed in front of the shade area, though I planted a couple of lilies in front of the
“verandah”, one in the semi-circular beds, and the
two Dutch iris in the bed in front of
the music room.

No idea why there are three different parameters for the lens, “Lens Info”, “Lens Model” and
“Lens ID”, all different, but clearly I've managed to get the second when I wanted the
third. Why? I know why: a while back I went back to look at some photos taken by Danny
Sluggett of the Mount Barker Courier15 years ago. The camera was a
professional Nikon D1 with a whopping
2624 kP:

So I had spent more time trying to frob my exposuredetails() function to adapt to
both. It worked for these few old Nikon images, but no longer for mine. After some time
messing around, I got Olympus to work again, but broke Nikon again. With a bit more work I
can get both to work, but what a pain! And I still need to work out why my exifx script, which calls the same function, returns
nothing at all for the lens.

We've been looking for a lounge room suite for years now, and we haven't been able to make
up our minds. Gradually I've been tending (back) towards a conventional 3 seater sofa and
two armchairs, with leather covering. But it's been a long conversation
discussion, and I was expecting more of same.

Today was shopping day anyway, so off with Yvonne to town, where she also met up with Doctor
Paul Smith, where we spent a considerable amount of time talking about jousting and other
mediaeval pastimes: Chris Bahlo was having a lesson at the same time. Also a bit about
Yvonne's osteoporosis treatment,
which will be with Denosumab,

Then off to Miners Rest, not without difficulty: we went via the freeway, and the exit was
anything but obvious:

What a dangerous intersection! It would be easy to miss the connection to the carriageway
on the other side and drive up the first half of the dual carriageway in the wrong
direction! I didn't make that mistake and crossed over—to the slip road back onto the
freeway! The photo doesn't show how difficult it is to recognize, but a little more signs
would have been of great help. There's no sign at all pointing to Miners Rest, which is the
next locality to the right.

Finally got there. The place looked a little different from the Google Map Street View:

Yvonne liked it, the price was right, so we took it. Not exactly what we had planned, but
at least that's one thing fewer to worry about.

Almost. How do we get it home? It's a bad time right now when Chris Bahlo doesn't have a
tow car, but we thought of borrowing her sister Melanie's horse float, which is at Chris'
place. But maybe we're too old for do it yourself. On the way back into town, dropped in
at Focus on Furniture, where we
bought our sideboard three years
ago. They had had a contractor deliver the thing, and when he arrived he indicated
that he was open to other transport stuff. OK, got his address—if he's the same bloke:
Linden (that's how they spelt it, and not the Lyndon that I would expect), phone number 0414
388 474. Called him up in the afternoon, and it looks like he can get it here in the next
day or two.

Chris Bahlo's Landcruiser is
on its last legs. It blew a head gasket a year ago, and my best bet is that the
(very expensive) repair was not done correctly, and it has been showing every indication of
a damaged gasket for some months now. It has other issues too—after all, it is about 25
years old, and she's had it for over 3 years. Time for a new car.

She needs financing, of course. And for well over 2 years we've had money in a monthly term
deposit, earning very little interest. So we agreed to split the difference: I lend the
money at an interest rate between what she would pay and what I would get.

That involved two transfers: from the term deposit with Central Victorian Investments and from my bank account
with Bank of Melbourne. In
principle the transfer from Bank of Melbourne should be trivial: just do an “Internet” transfer. But they wanted a reference
number, and there was no field on the transfer form to allow that:

OK, I had to sign a document for the Central Vic transfer anyway, so did that while we were
in town, and then down to the Bank of Melbourne to do a transfer from the bank.

Surprise, surprise: they can't do that from the bank. I had the options:

A “Bank cheque”, a guaranteed means of payment. That costs money, about $10 in my
recollection, but I didn't get as far as to find that out. They want 3 days to
clear the cheque. And that to the same bank group
(Westpac). Why? I put it to Ben,
the cashier, that it was either an indication of the complete failure of their computer
systems, or a deliberate choice to annoy the customer or increase their profits
(interest on thousands of pending bank cheques). He disagreed of course, but I don't
know if it's because he wasn't allowed to disagree, or he didn't understand. He just
said “we have separate computers” (“and never the twain shall meet”).

An instant transfer, where the money arrives as soon as the transaction is completed at
my end. This suggests that their computers can do quick transfers, making it
even less plausible that it should take 3 days to clear a bank guaranteed cheque.

“Internet” banking. I pointed out that there's no field to enter a reference. Oh yes,
there is:

That's not the term that they normally use, and there's no indication that the recipient
will see that—on the contrary, it suggests that the comment is private, which under some
circumstances could be embarrassing. Is this incompetence or malice? I think that in
this case I'll accept Hanlon's
razor.

It seems that I also have a limit that was lower than the $14,670 that I wanted to
transfer. Never mind, he could fix that. Just log in to your “Internet” banking (you
do have your details, right?) and he would do the rest. A good thing, too, because he
had one of the weirdest keyboards I have ever seen, clearly designed by somebody who had
never learnt to type: instead of a palm rest below the main keyboard there was a numeric
pad and some other stuff. It's not this keyboard (mercifully, there are very few to be
found on Google Image Search), but it's similar:

Finally he was finished, and then the system wanted to send a “secure code” to my phone
number—back home, of course. He offered to validate my mobile phone, but that way
madness lies. So that didn't work either.

Cash. He could pay me the whole amount in cash, and I could take it across the road
to Westpac and pay it in there. And
that was the last possibility! The bank just Does Not Have a normal transfer facility!

In the end, I opted for the cash payout. They didn't even have $100 notes! Take it to
another bank with equally incompetent methods? No way. We took it to the car sales
place and watched an accountant laboriously count the money:

All in all, over an hour of effort for something that should have taken a minute, not to
mention the insecurity of carrying so much cash. One of the reasons I have a bank is to
that I don't need to do that. Clearly the bank has failed. Only yesterday I was grumbling
about ANZ. But their incompetence seems to be
symptomatic. They still haven't made it into the 21st century, and least not conceptually.
And what a breath of fresh air Central Vic is in comparison. I should have transferred all
the money via them.

And on the way home I recalled my days
at Tandem Computers, where
nearly every bank in Europe was our customer. We had developed a collective noun for
bankers: a “wunch”, which, I see, has now turned up in Wiktionary.

I've ranted frequently about how Woolworths use fantasy names for foodstuffs. Today I wanted to buy
a papaya, but the ones at ALDI didn't look very good, so I tried at Woolworths,
where I found only half “paw paws”.

So I asked an assistant, who told me that they didn't have any papayas, only paw paws. OK,
half what I expected.

But he went on to say that paw paws weren't as sweet as papayas. That's the first time I've
ever heard that they were different fruit. Looked around and found “red papayas”, whatever
they are, along with “paw paws”:

Stopped in at Wendouree
Wholesalers (in Delacombe) for
some caraway seed. They have put in a showroom since I was last there, and they have a
number of things for sausage making, including skins and chemicals. But the most
interesting thing was an electric smoke oven. I've been thinking of building a smoke oven
for some time, and seven
years ago I bought a gas-run oven from ALDI. That was a disaster: apart from the inherent temperature regulation problem, the thing
couldn't be adjusted to normal smoking temperatures. The best thing about it was that it
came from ALDI, so I could take it back, no questions asked.

This electric oven has a thermostat, of course. But can it do cold-smoking? Spoke to
Craig, one of the assistants, who has one and uses it a lot. Lowest temperature he can set
is 30°, barely low enough for cold-smoking. But will it smoke at that temperature? The
chips are heated over the element, and if it doesn't get warmer than 30°, it won't smoke.
Left with intentions to do more research.

New dog food today, so I put today's portions in the kitchen to warm up to room temperature.
Came back some time later to find one of the bowls on the floor empty, with Piccola licking the juice. The food (beef and chicken
frame) was gone, but I soon found the culprit:

With tail it's 40 cm long, nearly as long as she is. How did she catch it? She was clearly
not interested in eating it, so I offered it to the dogs, and after a while Nikolai half-heartedly picked it up (after all, he had
gone short last night).
Then Petra Gietz, who was here today, asked about how the rat died. Poison?

Good question. I don't know of anybody round here who uses rat poison, but who knows? The
rat looked completely uninjured, which doesn't seem right for a rat caught by a cat. So
sorry, Niko, no rat for you.

We talked to Petra about what we should ask for it. We've had it for 17 years, and I was
thinking of asking $200. It seems that that wasn't too high: Petra's daughter Stephanie is
looking for a new lounge room suite, so she arranged to have it taken back with the same
bloke (L[iy]nd[eo]n) who delivers ours. That's excellent. That way we don't need to find a
place to put it until sold, and we don't have to move it at all.

Arranging the transport was still non-trivial. When could L.nd.n do it? When could Debra
(the seller) be available? After a surprising number of phone calls we agreed on 9:00
tomorrow morning.

Papaya? Red? It's a particularly boring melon. Went looking, and sure enough, found
this page from
Papaya Australia, which shows these
two, which it calls “red papaya” and “yellow pawpaw” respectively:

I have a very strong suspicion that this is more bad language, but this tells me a number of
things:

Linden (as his name proved to be) was supposed to pick up the new lounge room suite
in Miners Rest at 9:00 this
morning and bring it here. OK, we're in no particular hurry, but when by 11:40 we still
hadn't seen or heard anything, it seemed strange, especially since I had never received a
call back from Linden. What if something had gone wrong and he had the wrong number and
couldn't contact me? Called up Debra, who confirmed that the furniture had been collected
at 9:10. OK, maybe Linden did have trouble contacting me. Called him up. No, all
OK, he'd be there in 25 minutes.

Three-quarters of an hour later I saw a truck arrive at the gate. OK, must be Linden.
Waited. Waited. And then the phone rang: Linden, “Is your house number 29?”. At least he
had the right phone number.

We planned bogrács gulyás for dinner
this evening. But what does that mean?
It's Magyar, and the
translations I have seen say something like “cauldron goulash”. And Google translate translates it as “potato goulash” or just plain “goulash”, depending
on whether there's a space between the words or not. But why “cauldron”?

Nowadays, of course, we have Wikipedia, which (currently) shows the kind of cauldron implied:

The implication is that this is the original goulash, and the name really means “herdsman
cauldron”. Magyar is hard to understand at the best of times, but this one is interesting,
almost more a part of tradition than a straightforward recipe name.

Chris' sister Melanie has been here relatively frequently lately, because her horse is here.
The last two times she had wanted to bring her son Will with her, but he had been unwell.
Today was the other way round: he was supposed to be unwell, but she brought him with her.

Unfortunately, he took a liking to Piccola,
and discovered that he was allergic to (specifically) Siamese cats (as Melanie clarified).
Fit of coughing, and off home early for the medications that Melanie had forgotten to bring.

Chris Bahlo had arrived for dinner with a bottle of champagne to celebrate her new car. I
saw it in the daytime, but was too busy to take a photo. Here it is as they're leaving,
taken under lighting conditions where I could barely see the car:

Into town this morning with Yvonne, she
to Pilates, I to buy some kitchen
appliances from ALDI: a range hood and an
induction cooktop, branded “Stirling SICT60”.

Why? They're cheap, and I can bring them back again if I don't like them. The most
important reason, though, is that buying them is the only way to find out the
specifications, maybe only by trying them out. They'd save themselves a lot of money with
better descriptions.

The first shop (town centre) didn't have any cooktops left, 1 hour after opening. Off to
the shop in Learmonth St, near the
now-defunct Masters,
where they did. Then back into town with intent to pick up some odds and ends at Woolworths, but I didn't have time. The expedition
had used up the 60 minutes of Yvonne's training, and I had to pick her up first.

Woolworths is a never-ending source of commentary. After previous experience, I use coins
to disengage a trolley, not tokens. Today I put my coin in the trolley, but it didn't let
go of the chain. Fortunately the one in front wasn't connected, so I ended up with two
trolleys, and couldn't get my coin out of the slot:

Off to the information desk, and offered the assistant both trolleys for $1. She jiggled on
the chain a bit, extracted my $1 and gave it to me. The speed with which she did it
suggests a certain amount of experience.

Checking out was fun. All except one of the checkout terminals was occupied, and the other
one was busy dumping its heart out. The information stated that it was dumping diagnostic
information to a file with a name starting with C:\.... Tried to take a photo of
it, but an officious shop assistant got in my way:

Somehow I've been very busy lately, and so it's not surprising that we haven't planted the
bulbs I bought on Wednesday. I wasn't expecting them to start sprouting, though, but
the Crocus sativus had developed shoots up
to 5 cm long. High time to plant them.

The dogs were very interested in something up on the fence on the east side of the property
(towards the road) today. When Leonid barked,
I went out in hope of finding the cat that had been reported missing in Westons Road a
couple of weeks ago. But no such luck:

He then checked its sex. Why? It's obvious: a female could have had one or
more joeys in her pouch. It
seems that if their eyes are open, they have some hope of survival. But in this case it was
a male.

And what was the cause? It was up against the sheep mesh fence, and I wondered if it might
have got caught in the fence like so many other cases that we have seen round here. But no,
Gary thought that it had been run over. For a while I was left feeling malice towards the
driver, but of course there's little you can do to avoid this kind of accident, and most of
us have had it, myself three years
ago. But he could at least have called the wildlife people.

For years I've complained about poor exposure with flash. But my recent attempts, with the
Olympus STF-8 and the mecablitz 58 AF-2, seem to have been relatively well exposed. For the first shots of
the kangaroo, I had set the camera to add +1 EV to the flash exposure, but that caused the
images to be overexposed by about 1 EV, maybe only ⅔ EV. Why have things changed? Maybe
the subject?

Restless night. Leonid barked for some reason
round 3:45, and I couldn't get back to sleep. Round 5:46 I heard a “beep” from somewhere,
and off to the office to find the UPS grumbling to
itself, apparently being fed voltages that were all over the place.

The oven and adjacent microwave oven had reset their clocks, so clearly we had some kind of
power failure. The microwave
oven in the pantry showed 7:02. What does that mean? That it didn't fail? It resets to
(paradoxically) 1:00 on a power failure and carries on running, so it could indicate a
failure at 23:44. On the other hand, I can't set the clock manually: I've lost the
instruction manual, and if clock setting still works, it's well hidden. The time displayed
doesn't match the time of the previous outage (2:06).

Strangely, I was woken by a “beep” at 5:46 the following day, though there were no
problems. Did the sound come from somewhere else?

He was quite informative. Yes, this was a scheduled outage, and he was replacing an
amplifier module which they thought could be defective. We'd be up again quite soon (which
he later clarified as “an hour or two”). The whole thing relates to the modifications they
performed to support 3.4 GHz connections. The modifications themselves are complete, and we
now have an uplink bandwidth of a whopping 394 Mb/s, almost enough to sustain 16 parallel
downloads at 25 Mb/s. He couldn't tell me what the bandwidth had been before, but no wonder
we run into congestion at peak usage periods.

3.4 GHz? I had been told 3.5 GHz, and OzTowers agrees with me. Was the technician mistaken, or is the truth somewhere in
between?

Was the maintenance really scheduled? We still have the prospect of another 4 hour outage
some time in early next month, and we were informed of that. Given the nature of the work,
I think this was unplanned, but of course he got a job order.

The cabinet was open, showing a surprising amount of equipment, most of which was difficult
to identify, though there were a large number of (probably redundant) power supplies.

I was quite impressed by the appearance of the installation, and he told me that it was much
more modern than the Telstra tower 100 m away.
He was from Decon, who do work for
Telstra as well.

True to his word, the connection bounced several times (probably for testing), and finally
came back up at 16:50. 9 outages today (102 minutes), a total of 28 (1,107 minutes, 18.4
hours) in the past 40 days, an availability of only 98.1%. Will they finally get their act
together?

Date

Outages

Duration

Availability

Date

(seconds)

1521032400

1

26968

68.79%

# 15 March 2018

1522069200

2

27326

68.37%

# 27 March 2018

1522764000

1

1225

98.58%

# 4 April 2018

1523196000

6

3935

95.45%

# 9 April 2018

1523541600

5

850

99.02%

# 13 April 2018

1524405600

9

6098

92.94%

# 23 April 2018

I get the impression that they don't have much in the way of diagnostics, and that today's
effort involved a lot of “suck it and see”.

Callum Gibson noted my article about the conflicting information for
my Crocus sativus bulbs, and read
it more carefully than I did. The bulbs were sold for planting now and ostensibly flowering
in the spring. That wasn't what I had recalled, but the label was clear:

It's been over a week since
Chris Bahlo brought me a VHS cassette to
copy. In principle I have everything that I need to copy—except for a cable connecting the
equipment to the monitor (TV). Today I finally got round to scouring the shed for a
suitable cable.

In to the lounge room to discover that it was 10 cm too short to fit where the DVD recorder
(the old Digitrex GKX-9000) was, so
ended up with the equipment balanced on a loudspeaker:

It's not that long ago that TVs started coming with composite video input, and now it's gone
again. So I basically can't use the old VHS recorder any more, because it doesn't have
anything else. Still, the Digitrex has component output, so I was able to connect it like
that and feed the VHS input through it:

What now? It could be that it's the TV that doesn't understand NTSC, but one way or another
I need to find a way to convert the images to something that the TV can display. Maybe I
should take another look at Chris' converter. She probably didn't expect the tape to be the
issue.

I've been concerned for some time about the way the State
of Israel treats the people and territory
that it conquered over 50 years
ago. But it's difficult to criticize without being called anti-semitic (“Semitic”: Jewish or Arab;
“Anti-Semitic”: Anti-Jewish). In particular it's hard to believe that their actions are in
accordance in with international or national law.

I've been getting a daily feed from the Times
of Israel for some time now, and recently they published this article by a prominent Jewish lawyer, who effectively says the same thing. Now
if only they would pay attention to this kind of criticism.

Spent another considerable period of time trying to get more up-to-date photos of myself
than what I've had on the web for the past 15 years or so. Gradually I'm getting there.
This is the one I have at the top of most pages (including this one, at least currently).
First the old one, then the one I tried two weeks ago, then today:

In passing, it's interesting that for 15 years I didn't notice how much excess space there
is at the top of the first photo. Is the bottom one too short? I tried this alternative,
mainly for the photo at top left (In faded ink from the late 1980s: “The extra far, far,
furthest side: Greg discusses a Guardian TPR with the Ayatollah”):

But how does it work? Unlike their el-cheapo induction cookers, this one doesn't specify
the amount of power used at each level, though it does state that levels 1 and 2 are (both)
suitable for “Delicate warming for small amounts of food”, “Gentle simmering” and similar.
Are they? I can't put my hand on the instructions for the portable unit, but I seem to
remember similar claims.

There are two fields with a maximum of 2000 W output (front right and rear left), while the
other two have 1500 W. But they're all the same size. The dotted cross on the glass shows
the limits, as I discovered after shining a light through the surface:

Only 18 cm! The smallest pans I have are about 26 cm, and my biggest ones are 32 cm. It
looks as if my current device has the same diameter, so that would be too small. Still, I
can try it out. The good news is that it's well sealed, and there appears to be no reason
not to just put it on the cooktop—once I have found a plug for the thing.

And that's another problem I hadn't thought of. With all four elements on at full power,
the thing uses 7 kW. That makes it the (potential) biggest power consumer in the house,
using more than half the rated 11.3 kW that Powercor allows us. The ”Specifications” in the instructions are too polite to
mention the circuit breaker current requirements, but it's on the cable itself: 25 A,
corresponding to 5.65 kW.

How do they get away with that? A 32 A breaker would be barely enough. Clearly they're not
expecting anybody to use all four fields on full power; even their “troubleshooting” doesn't
mention “Cooktop trips circuit breaker”.

Somehow I spent most of today in the kitchen. Part was cooking food for this evening, but
also a lot of tidying up, including freezing the remainder of the bogrács gulyás that I made
last week. But one of the
containers was too flimsy, and as I pressed the lid on, the contents escaped over the
cooktop, the floor and me:

Lying awake in the morning, heard a “beep”. That's not the first time. And this time it
was at 5:44. I was woken at 5:46 on Monday, and again on Tuesday. Out to take a look. No, no evidence of any power
failures.

So what is it? I'm normally asleep at this time of morning, but maybe there's something
that normally beeps at this time (though the difference between 5:44 and 5:46 is real).
What could it be?

In fact, they have barely changed, so today got round to covering them over, and also
planting most of the Freesias
and Hyacinths that we bought
last week. And while I was
looking at it, noted that
our Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
in the garden is finally flowering. I don't seem to have noted when we planted it, but it
must have been two years. Sadly, it's not very pretty:

Last week I had complained
about ANZ's handling of an apparently lost
money transfer, and I wanted an explanation for:

Why they claimed that they couldn't give information about what happened to the
transfer.

Why they claimed to have attempted to “recall” the sum from an unintended
recipient.

Why they wrote “unintended” recipient when they had established (and kept hidden
from me) that the money had indeed been transferred to the intended recipient.

Why they didn't say what had happened to the money.

Why they claimed privacy concerns when talking about my money.

Why they don't have an alternative to their voice non-recognition menus.

Today a response arrived. How many of these points did they answer? None of them:

My understanding of your concern is

On 13 March 2018, you have transferred $120.00 to a nominated account. The intended
recipient has contact you to advise that they have not received the funds.

So far correct.

ANZ has attempted to recall the funds however, this has been unsuccessful.

Original punctuation, and no explanation of why it was unsuccessful.

As a resolution, you are seeking the payment of $120.00 returned to your account.

No. Where did they get that idea?

On 17 April 2018, we have confirmed the BSB and account number of the
indented [sic] recipient and we have noted no discrepancy with the account
information

So why did they write unintended? And why did the original letter not state
this?

And apart from boilerplate, that's all. That doesn't answer any of my questions.

Although the letter was clearly personal, it shows a lack of insight that I find horrifying.
Nowadays “unprofessional” tends to mean corrupt, and there's no evidence of that, but this
behaviour appears to be the work of a rank amateur, and it seems to be systematic: the
customer service people seem to be completely incompetent. What can I do now? Publishing
this information would be a good first step.

In late morning, yet another NBN outage. Was
the techie right on Monday when he didn't sound overly enthusiastic that his replacement
would solve the problem? After we had been off the air for a bit over an hour, went over to
see what was going on:

The photos I took of the Decon van were
done with the Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4 on the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II.
Which image stabilization should I use? Both camera and lens have image stabilization, but
this combination doesn't work together. In the past I've found that the in-body
stabilization is better than the lens stabilization, but there's some anecdotal evidence
that lens stabilization is better at long focal lengths. These images were taken at 300 mm
(600 mm equivalent on full-frame sensors), so I tried both ways:

Any difference? Hardly. But then I did an extreme blow-up of the rego plate (corresponding
to a focal length of 5,184 mm, or 10,368 mm full-frame). And not surprisingly, there was a
little unsharpness. But it wasn't due to camera shake, and it differed between the two
images:

Everybody knows what local time is, right? I thought so, anyway. In fact, there's no
accurate definition. For me, it's obvious that it's the time used at a particular location,
in other words as defined by your local time zone.

the standard Time is calculated by time zone only but local time has 4 min difference at
every longitudes. And longitudes play very important roll to calculate the time. there are
24 time zones in the world and according to that question I think this the way to
calculate. and only because of longitudes time can be calculated. Greenwich Prime Meridian
is the base line to divide the world into eastern hemisphere and western hemisphere and
this is the longitude only.

That's not correct, of course. But clearly it's being taught. It seems that some people
(India again?) use the term “local time” to
mean mean solar time, also known
as local mean time, an obsolete
method used to even out the effects of eccentricities in the earth's orbit before the advent
of time zones. There's no basis for this assumption: local time is the time that you will
see on clocks in any specific location, and it's defined by the time zone.

This definition does serve one purpose, though: if I'm correct, it explains these
nonsensical questions, at least when “local time” is specified.

the time based on the meridian through a specific place, as a city, in contrast to that
of the time zone within which the place is located; the time in a specific place as
compared to that of another place to the east or west. Origin of local time. 1825-1835.

local timen. (originally) time at a particular place reckoned from the
instant of transit of the mean sun over the meridian at that place (which defines noon);
(now more usually, and sometimes as a postmodifier) time as reckoned in the time zone
containing the observer or the specified place;

So the meaning changed with the advent of time zones, as one would expect. The quotations
show the last use of the old meaning in 1865:

1865 Catholic World Apr. 127/1 Railway time is gradually beating local time.

And the first clear reference to the new meaning is:

1968 H. Franklin Crash i. 9 Our estimated time of arrival at Cairo is 17.45 local
time, 15.45 G.M.T.

I'm gradually getting into the swing of creating my weekly house photos with TIFF images and Photomatix PRO. But to make up for that,
Hugin put a spanner in the works.
Firstly, it came up with wildly different exposures and colour values for the individual
images, like here:

That shows different EV values from the original images, which were taken with EV 13.3. It
chose values between 14.7 and 15.3, thus explaining the darkness. In addition,
the Er (red multiplier) and Eb (blue multiplier) values for colour are all
over the place, explaining the different in colours between the various parts of the final
image. Resetting everything to the correct values (EV 13.3, Er and Eb all 1) fixed the
problem. Why does it change things? How can I stop it?

And for reasons I don't understand, the “verandah” panorama didn't close. The control point
detector found no points at all between these two adjacent shots: